Raw Material

Anna was on the phone when she walked through the door of her mum’s house, three days after she died. The house was dark. Misshapen lumps of shadow crowded the hall, cluttered up doorways, climbed the stairs. Anna stood among them, holding her phone in one hand – the tinny voice on the other end talking to no one now – and a bag of cleaning supplies in the other. She could just make out her own face in the mirror above the brimming sideboard; it looked pale and drawn.

She hung up. It had been a work call, something of no importance, and because of that she had missed the moment of walking in. It should have been significant – coming home for the first time since home her mum had left this place – but she’d been too preoccupied to notice.

She put her phone in her pocket and went through the kitchen (a disaster zone of dirty plates and empty food packets) to the utility room (no better). The cold had moved in. They’d turned the heat off when they took her mum away, and now there was condensation on the insides of the windows, so the view out to the back garden and the naked trees beyond was blurred. She kept her coat on as she adjusted the thermostat. The bag she had brought contained sponges, rubber gloves, bleach and three different kinds of cleaning spray – a paltry offering against a lifetime of mess and clutter and refusing to let anything go. Nothing to do but roll up her sleeves and get stuck in.

Three hours later the kitchen looked almost the same as when she had started, despite the washing-up liquid and the elbow grease and the filled bin bags that now sat out on the patio, bathing in the slanted late-afternoon light. How did Mum live like this? How had Mum lived like this? Suddenly the room felt too close. Anna decided to go upstairs.

Mum’s room was cold, but the radiator in the corner clicked. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the bed; she didn’t want to know if the people who had come for her mum had taken the time to straighten the covers or left them in the shape she had made. She wasn’t sure which would be worse.

She wanted something manageable, something she could tackle in an hour or two and still feel like she’d accomplished something today. The left-hand wardrobe – relatively small and self-contained. She could take everything out and decide what could go to charity and what should go in the bin. That was how you cleared up the detritus of a busy life: one bit at a time.

The box was at the bottom of the wardrobe, under a pile of jumpers and shirts that had fallen off their hangers. She dug it out and sat back on her heels, put it on the floor in front of her. Somehow it had not occurred to her that she would find it here, even though she had thought about it, and what it contained, countless times over the years. Even though she knew Mum would never have gotten rid of it.

When she touched the box, part of her hoped she would feel her mum’s presence at her back – just like when she’d been caught in exactly this position, in this room, twenty-five years ago. She felt nothing.

The once-white cardboard was yellowed and squashed from the weight of the things that had lain on it; the ribbon was stained and frayed at the edges. The whole thing looked like long-buried treasure, or something dredged up from the bottom of the ocean. When she untied the ribbon, a few fibres came off in her hands, but the lid slipped off easily and the delicate blue tissue paper still smelled faintly of perfume.

Inside the box, beneath the last layer of tissue, was her grandmother’s scarf. Grandma had made it herself, and it was a thing of meticulous beauty, knitted with tiny, precise stitches from rust-coloured wool that looked as soft as baby hair. But despite the chill, Anna did not touch it. The scarf smelled of precious, shut-away things. As far as she knew, nobody had ever worn it – except Anna herself.

*

“What are you doing?”

She looked over her shoulder and saw Mum standing behind her in the bedroom doorway. She looked shocked – but there was something else in her face too. Fear?

“I was looking for the polish, for my school shoes,” Anna said. But the excuse felt weak, with ribbon and tissue spilling from the open box, and smooth cashmere wrapped around her neck.

“Put that away! Right now!” Mum didn’t wait for her to move; she stepped forward, carefully took the scarf off her and folded it back in its box. “You shouldn’t go through people’s private things.”

“I’m sorry,” Anna said. “I just … wondered what it was.”

Mum put the lid on the box, retied the ribbon, put it back in the wardrobe and closed the door. Only then did her face relax, but she said nothing.

“It’s beautiful,” Anna said.

“Yes,” said Mum, letting out a breath that seemed to deflate her. “My mother made it – she was a wonderful knitter.”

“Did she make it for you?”

“In a way. She made it when I was ten, but not for me to wear. She wanted me to look at it, to see what good knitting looks like.” Mum caught her eye and looked away quickly. “She told me I could wear it when I could make one just like it. But I’ve never been much good at knitting, so I’ve never worn it.”

“Why did you keep it?”

“Well, I can’t get rid of it.”

“Why not? It seems harsh to give you something so nice and not let you wear it. You could give it to charity.”

But Mum shook her head and looked at Anna as if the idea had simply never crossed her mind.

*

Anna had just three memories of her grandmother. The earliest one was of Grandma shouting at her after she ran through the house and knocked an antique plate off the dresser. It smashed and she told Anna, “Little girls should be seen and not heard,” and made her sit on a hard chair for what felt like days.

The next memory is a snapshot taken from knee height, looking up. Grandma stands opposite Mum, who reaches out to her, but she bats her hand away. Then she says something and smiles, and Mum’s face twists like she’s been struck. Grandma laughs and walks away.

Anna’s last memory was actually a memory of her mum, taking a phone call in the middle of Disneyland and bursting into tears, and then going on all the rides for the rest of the day with total emptiness in her eyes. The phone call was to tell her that Grandma had died.

*

The house was warm now. She carried the box downstairs, leaving the lid on the bedroom floor and the wardrobe doors open. She found the tea among the still-good boxes of food she’d laid out on the kitchen table earlier, and made herself some in a just-cleaned mug. She hadn’t got round to descaling the kettle yet, and a few pale flakes found their way into the tea.

Back in the living room, she pushed a pile of old Radio Times off the sofa so she could curl up under Mum’s worn old blanket and put the box on her knees. She left the scarf nestled in its paper; she only wanted to look at it.

Mum had taught Anna how to knit, and Grandma had taught her. Grandma was brilliant at handiwork, could pick up a ball of wool or a skein of thread and turn it into something sumptuous. In fact, she was like that with everything she turned her hand to – cooking, painting, playing the piano; anything she believed an accomplished woman should be able to do – and she could never understand why her daughter lacked the same flair for making beautiful things.

Mum never talked about what it had been like to learn knitting from Grandma, except for one veiled reference to a dropped stitch, the sudden jab of a needle, blood on wool. As a result, she had never done much knitting – her fingers shook when she held the needles – but when Anna first expressed an interest, after finding the scarf, she sat her down to teach her.

It was a hard winter and Anna was fourteen. The lashing weather had trapped them indoors, and Mum dug out her box of knitting supplies, which she kept in the loft and hadn’t touched in twenty years. They’d closed the curtains even though it wasn’t even dark yet, and Mum handed her a ball of soft, steel-grey wool. She showed her how to cast on and do the basic stitches – knit one, purl one. Anna’s fingers were clumsy, and to begin with she dropped as many stitches as she made. But Mum was patient, and they knitted and murmured over the TV for two hours until Anna had produced a wobbly square.

“Well done!” said Mum. “You’re a natural.”

Anna looked at her square and frowned. “No, I’m not. It’s a mess. Look at it!” She looked at Mum’s handiwork – the beginnings of a scarf; not as neat as Grandma’s, but much better than hers.

“This is your first time – you can’t expect to do it perfectly right away.”

“But I know what to do! I just can’t get my fingers to do it.”

Mum looked at her own slightly trembling hands. “It’s OK if it’s a bit messy. Besides, nobody’s perfect but God.”

Those words echoed, always, in Anna’s mind.

And so she practiced. And practiced and practiced. She might not be able to live up to Grandma’s exacting standards, but she did improve. There were fewer dropped stitches; she needed Mum’s help less and less; she didn’t have to go back and unravel her mistakes nearly as often. The first time she completed a scarf without fumbling a single stitch, she held it up to the light and smiled – I can be as perfect as God, if I set my mind to it.

*

Night had fallen outside. The kitchen was still a mess – dishes piled in the sink, the water long since turned cold and clear. She knew she ought to get up and do something, finish anything she’d started today, but she couldn’t make herself move. If she sat still enough, she could almost believe that Mum had just stepped out, would be back any minute with tea and the biscuit tin. Besides, it was cosy under the blanket, with the quiet hum of the radiator.

She would have to deal with this room last. How many times had she told her mum to throw out the old magazines, pare down the ornaments (did she really need trinkets on every surface?), pour away the dry soil and dead plants from the pots on the sill? But now that Mum wasn’t here to stop her, to look at her sideways and chuckle that she liked it like this, why couldn’t Anna do it?

One of the last times she had seen her mum alive was ten days earlier, at the hospice. She was hooked up to a drip – something to ease the pain – and she kept closing her eyes. Anna wondered whether she could actually get any rest when she did that; her eyelids were paper thin and surely let all the light through.

The decline had been slow and expected. In the months after the diagnosis, they had learned to talk carefully around what was happening – trying not to mention it at first, backing away when certain words came up that made the conversation stagger. Anna ate the meals her mum cooked and did not comment on the hair that had fallen into the sauce; chewing and swallowing it rather than embarrass her. Then, as death became a more obvious presence, they’d had no choice but to talk about it – practical details mostly, logistics and paperwork; never touching on the raw departure at the heart of it all, but spiralling closer every day.

On that almost-last day, she’d sat by her mum’s bed, telling her things. She talked about her day, things she’d done, people she’d spoken to – nice, cheery things that might bring a little of the outside into this small, final room. Mum had a tissue in her hand and she rubbed it between her fingers as Anna spoke, until it began to crumble onto the blanket. Anna leaned forward and brushed the paper flakes into her hand.

“Leave it,” Mum said and waved the back of her hand at Anna. She could only manage a few words at a time now.

“You’re making a mess.”

She didn’t answer, concentrated on breathing.

“I’m having Rob and Julia over for dinner next week,” Anna said. “Thought I’d make an apple pie.”

“That’ll be nice,” Mum said.

“Yeh, I was thinking about cheesecake, but I don’t have time to practice it before Wednesday.”

“Practice?”

“I’ve never made one before.”

“So?”

“So I’m not going to serve something I don’t know how to make.”

Why did they always end up here? Why did Anna have to push back against everything her mum said? In the car outside, she’d looked in the rear view mirror and told herself she wouldn’t do this any more – that it was better to be nice than right. But less than an hour in she’d already scolded her mum for the tissue and now they were bickering.

“Practice on them.”

“And if it’s a total disaster?”

“Disasters don’t matter,” Mum rasped. “They’re your friends.”

Not a surprise, this wisdom, from the woman who’d hauled Anna through her formative years in a cacophony of burnt toast, lost keys and near-misses with the school bus.

“Well, I’m making apple pie,” she said. “It’s fine to want to get it right.”

“OK, dear,” Mum said, and Anna felt instantly guilty again, because her mum had done what she could not – been nice rather than right. Was she taking the high ground, or was she simply too breathless to argue? It hardly mattered. When her mum squeezed her hand, Anna saw pity in her eyes, and it made her feel so exposed that she resolved to pity her more. Which was easy, in the end.

*

A gust of wind blew against the house, but the room had warmed up nicely now. The glow of the lamps deepened. In the box, the scarf nestled like a sleeping animal.

Gently, she touched it. The wool was soft and clean; it was such a shame that it hadn’t been touched this way before. She pulled it out and let the box fall to the floor. She wrapped the scarf around her neck and stood up to look at herself in the mirror above the fireplace. How much of her grandmother was in her face? How much of Mum? The more she looked for her, the less she could see – it felt wrong.

She ran the scarf through her fingers until she found the end. There it was, tucked away and sewn in place with a small piece of thread. Her grandmother, years before, had tied this tiny knot, snipped off the excess, admired her creation for a few seconds and then put it away. Not something to wear, but an object lesson. And yet here Anna was, wearing it.

She put her teeth to the thread and snapped it easily. Then it was simply a matter of tugging on the end and letting the whole thing unravel. So much work, so many hours of exacting labour, and it came apart in her hands as easily as breathing. In a few moments the scarf was no more than a tangle of orange wool on the living room carpet. She picked it up and began to wind it into a ball. Somewhere in the house, Mum had knitting needles. She would find them, curl up on the sofa, knit something new.

Clare Diston is a writer, editor and proofreader based in Bristol, UK. She has an MA in Creative Writing and is currently studying for a BSc in Astronomy. Her writing has appeared in Mslexia, Capsule Stories and Luna Station Quarterly, and her work has been nominated for the O. Henry Award and longlisted for the Fractured Lit Anthology Prize.